VolkerW's WebLog

TechNet Edge Content in local languages – Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

2009-06-26T23:09:27Z

Some time ago TechNet Edge started introducing videos and screen casts in local languages. We use tags to identify the “foreign” (read: non-English) language content.

In case you are only interested in content in your local language and in case our fellow evangelists in your country or region have created local content, it is marked with a tag representing your language. The tag is – guess what – in English.

To make a long story short, here’s an example of an RSS feed of only German content: http://edge.technet.com/Tags/German/rss/.

Check if content in your language is available. The general idea for other local language content applies. Find your language tag(s) in the tag cloud and add “/rss” to the URL.

Superfast and highly scalable Lizard

2009-06-26T16:10:49Z

This little animal helps you answering one of the most important question after installing Windows HPC Server 2008. Is this thing working? To find out if and how well it is working, Microsoft sent you this little critter.

Lizard - Lizard helps you to determine the computational performance and efficiency that can be achieved by your HPC Pack 2008-based / Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. It calculates and reports a peak performance value for your HPC cluster in billions of floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS), and a percentage value for the efficiency that was achieved at peak performance. After running Lizard, you can review the performance and efficiency results that were obtained, and optionally save these results and the parameters that were used to achieve them to a file on your computer.

Lizard is included in the latest Microsoft HPC Pack 2008 Tool Pack and can be downloaded here. BTW, it is based on Linpack and automatically optimizes the 29 Linpack input parameters to you individual cluster.

Additional resources:

Windows HPC Server 2008
Microsoft HPC Resource Kit
Info about Linpack
Intel Math Kernel Library
Wikipedia about Lizards

New IIS SEO Toolkit beta available for download

2009-06-03T19:47:06Z

Today Microsoft announced the availability of the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – a set of brand new tools that help Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their site's relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly, which is especially important now. Got the bing?

Over at the Windows Server Division Weblog Eric Rezabek, a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft, provides more details about content and download links.

The sound of found: Bing!

2009-05-28T16:22:28Z

This morning Steve Ballmer announced the new Microsoft search engine at D7. The product’s name is Bing. Bing will launch on June 3rd at http://www.bing.com. Bing goes beyond just search. Find out at decisionengine.com.

With Bing, Microsoft wants to accomplish three main goals:

Making Search Easier
Making Search More Organized
Providing Tools to Help You Complete Tasks

Read the facts sheets and find out how.

Don’t miss the team blog to find out what’s behind the name and more.

CTP of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 available today!

2009-05-21T02:02:02Z

Today Microsoft made available the Community Technical Preview (CTP) of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2.

Based on Windows Server 2008 R2, the CTP is a preliminary release, allowing an early preview of planned functionality for HPC Server 2008 R2.

Check out Ryan's blog post on the Windows Server Division blog and download the CTP via the Microsoft HPC website.

Free e-Books from Microsoft Press

2009-05-20T20:35:44Z

Microsoft Press celebrated 25 years of publishing. Congratulations! As part of their ongoing celebration they give away free e-books. The latest 2:

Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit, by Christa Anderson and Kristin L. Griffin with the Microsoft Presentation Hosted Desktop Virtualization Team (PDF, 38.0 MB). In-depth and comprehensive, this Resource Kit delivers the information you need to set up, deploy, and manage a Terminal Services farm using Windows Server 2008. For more information or to buy the print version of this title, visit the Microsoft Learning website.

The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention, by Marc McDonald, Robert Musson, and Ross Smith (PDF, 4.3 MB). This practical, hands-on guide captures, categorizes, and builds a process of best practices to help avoid creating defects during the development process—rather than fixing them after extensive analysis. For more information or to buy the print version of this title, visit the Microsoft Learning website.

Note: You will need to temporarily allow pop-ups in order to download the free e-books.

http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_press/archive/2009/05/20/two-free-e-books-available-in-may.aspx

Visual Studio 2010 aka. Dev10 Beta available for download

2009-05-18T17:46:54Z

MSDN subscribers have access to the beta 1 version of Visual Studio 2010. Go download the awesome beta 1 of Dev10 and the .Net Framework 4 from MSDN.

New Windows 7 UI features for developers

2009-05-18T15:45:00Z

There’s a series of great screen casts up on Channel9. In just 10 minutes you will get a basic aunderstanding on how to implement/use the new feature. Each episode also includes downloadable source code:

See it all on Channel9 and Gunter’s blog.

Windows Server 2008 Interop with Linux and OS X

2009-05-18T14:28:15Z

"There are a number of ways to invite Linux, UNIX, and OS X to the Windows Server Active Directory party. The operating systems we use today will interoperate in many ways because each includes some level of common protocol support. Support for HTTP is an obvious protocol they all share. SMB is also commonly used for access to Windows file system shares. In the UNIX world, NFS ruled the ether for years. Thankfully directory and security protocols like LDAP and Kerberos have also become common in the desktop and server operating systems."

Watch a 3 episode series of helpful how-to screen casts on Keith's blog.

TechEd 09 on TechNet Edge

2009-05-18T14:19:08Z

Last week TechEd 09 happened in LA. The Edge team talked to a lot of important and interesting folks at the event. You can watch all videos on the portal. Look for the teched09 tag.

BTW, the team did not manage to finish and upload all interviews. Expect more interesting content during this week.

Hyper-V News at TechEd in LA

2009-05-13T13:52:56Z

Jeff Woolsey – after the #TechEd session – posted an update on Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 on the Virtualization team blog. Here’s test gist of it:

Support 64 logical processors
384 concurrently running VMs per server
Greatly enhance processor compatibility

Read the full post at the source.

Visit The TechNet Edge Lounge at TechED US

2009-05-08T15:52:55Z

The TechNet Edge Lounge is back. Like the year before, Microsoft worldwide ITEs host friends, guests and celebrities at the lounge for IT Professionals, Developers, Architects, basically everyone at TechEd US.

You find the lounge in TechEd’s center of gravity. In the main exhibition hall, embedded within the MSDN/TechNet Zone.

If you are a Microsoft evangelist, join the Microsoft evangelists meet-up at the lounge on Monday 12pm to 1pm.

The lounge will be a place for attendees to hang out and relax from a busy event. It allows you to meet with friends, partners and customers. Enjoy our cozy bean bags.

We invited Microsoft executives to come visit and chat with attendees in the lounge. During the week we will also be recording a few video interviews with attendees and Evangelists from Microsoft.

Really looking forward to meeting you all at TechEd!

New Hyper-V Resources on TechNet

2009-05-07T16:23:35Z

Just got word about an amazing collection of resources about Hyper-V and virtualization in general.

Anything you ever wanted to know about Hyper-V but didn’t know where to find.

Hyper-V Technical Information and Resources for IT Professionals

Technical Library, How To… videos, Go Green, Labs, Step-by-step guides and more

Windows Server TechCenter for Hyper-V

All about planning, installation, deployment, management

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 hit RC today

2009-04-30T16:08:04Z

Yes!

Find the latest and greatest about both release candidates (RC) on TechNet Edge. TechNet Edge, your source for up to date news, interviews and screen cast for IT Professionals worldwide.

Some links IT Professionals (and developers as well) will be excited about:

Windows Server 2008 RC interview with Ward
Latest info about Windows Server 2008 R2 RC
Latest info about Windows 7 RC

Good reason for becoming a MSDN or TechNet subscriber:
Subscribers will have access to the bits today.

April 2009 Cumulative Update of the SQL Server Driver for PHP, version 1.0 is live!

2009-04-30T15:35:26Z

The second cumulative update to version 1.0 of the SQL Server Driver for PHP is now available for download on the MSDN download site. We have also published the updates to the source on the CodePlex site. The source code has been modified specifically so that the extension can be compiled and used with the current builds of PHP 5.3.

Go get it.